Month: March 2018

My sister, Francine, has recently gotten into fishing. She moved out near the coast about a year back, and since then she’s steadily developed something of a passion for local seafood. Seemingly, one thing has led to another and now she’s literally knee-deep in catching her own fish.

She told me yesterday over beers that the next step is getting a boat. I nearly choked on my lemon wedge when she said that, since Francine has never even owned a car. Going one further, she wants to have the boat in question custom made. You’d think that marine welding and fabrication services in Melbourne, of all places, would be a fairly niche thing to come by, but Francine already has a list of possible candidates for the job. I can tell that she’s serious about this.

It’s vaguely interesting hearing her go on about fishing equipment and boat accessories, purely because my level of knowledge in this area is next to zilch. I mean, when she started up on the subject of custom stainless steel snapper racks, I thought she was talking about some sort of shelving unit for fish (actually, snapper racks are for holding fishing rods, Francine will have you know).

I have to say, I’m impressed with Francine’s growing expertise, or at least her ability to create the illusion of having it. It’s probably not very generous of me to second-guess her, really – she made a mean fish taco situation happen on the barbie with goods she’d caught herself. It’s only when she gets to blathering on about bait boards and bow rails that I start to wonder if she’s making things up, but a quick definition check on my phone generally comes through with a result concerning some steel accessories for fishing boats.

Plate alloy fabrication is the next aspect of the whole shebang that Francine plans to look into, she tells me. She’s plotting to have an alloy hull constructed to her specifications and fit it out herself, with the help of a friendly couple she met down at the beach. Whatever floats your boat!

It’s pretty unusual for a Japanime company to make a show based on an older game, one that people have forgotten a little bit. I guess Dinky Dai-Animation isn’t your average company as I feel they have proved many times over. The old Felix Knight games still maintain their popularity in modern-day internet meme culture, so maybe that’s what sparked this idea.

Ahh, great memes. Highest scone.

Anyway, they’ve brought back Felix Knight as a wizened practitioner of business law, office in Melbourne (and sometimes in space, but they dropped that after the first couple of games) with no direction in his life. I’ve only seen up to episode three, because I had to go to a stupid family reunion in Mildura this weekend and their Wi-Fi was just trash (plus Mum kept making me come down and talk to my grandparents), but I love how they’ve captured and contrasted the legend of Felix Knight with lack of purpose in life. He’s now Melbourne’s very best business lawyer. People come from all around to hear his advice, they flock to his speaking appointments, and fangirls stop him in the street so he can write his catch-phrase- ABJECTION!- on their arms.

But where do you go when you reach the top of the mountain? The series is a slow burn- at least 20% of the first three episodes have been Felix standing at the top of his business lawyer firm skyscraper, staring out the window of his office and giving long mental dialogues on his motivations (or lack of). The only time he’s stepped into a courtroom has been the cliffhanger of episode three, where he learns that a rival property law firm within Melbourne has taken on a major client. We don’t know the name of the client, but the forums are all saying it’s someone from Felix’s mysterious past. What else would cause him to suit up and take the stand again??

I woke up today with a persistent pain in my lower left back. It’s not really all that serious…not so far, anyway. But i always knew all this was coming from the moment I turned 30. It’s just that age, so they say. Everything starts to break down, and in a few years I’ll just be a mess of aches and pains like everyone else. And it’ll be all I can talk about at parties, although an upside is that I can replace the typical ‘good thanks’ response with ‘not so bad, just aching a bit’, or some sort of variant.

I suppose it’ll be worse in the early days, right now when I haven’t had a thousand and one conversations where fellow aged people have given me a load of tips and tricks to cope. But soon…soon, I will know. I’ll start carrying brochures for a nearby dry needling course in New Zealand, so that everyone can go along and have the tools to combat pains and aches and strang cricks in places you never knew you had. That’s enough material to last for an entire party, or possibly one full session of coffee with a friend, although we may need to allocate time to talk about the government. And when I say ‘talk about the government’ then I do of course mean that we’ll spend the entire time complaining. You get to my age and you just have to complain about everything, from aches to parliament. Not about pain-relieving methods like dry needling though, since they’re what takes the pain away. And I’m only 30 now. Give it a few years and trigger point dry needling courses will have evolved to the point where complaints about pain will have been cut down by…ooh, maybe 40%? I don’t want to be too optimistic about the future, because when you get to my age, you lose a lot of optimism. Those positive thoughts are for the youth. Ah, to be young again…